Faerie Tale Theatre (also known as Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre) is an American live-action fairytale fantasy anthology television series, consisting of 27 episodes, retelling 25 fairy tales, particularly tales by The Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault and Hans Christian Andersen, plus the poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” and a special episode called “The Grimm’s Party”, showcasing the series cast and crew, that originally aired on Showtime from September 11, 1982 until November 14, 1987. 

Shelley Duvall, who created the series served as host and executive producer of the program alongside Bridget Terry and Fred Fuchs, and occasionally starred in, narrated episodes and also served as a voice artist for the animatronic Nightingale in episode The Nightingale. The series was directed by luminaries such as Francis Ford Coppola, Emile Ardolino and Tim Burton, and would feature numerous Hollywood stars; predominately of the period, in character roles. This was one of the first examples of cable original programming, alongside HBO‘s Fraggle Rock.^[1]

The series was followed by two other less successful shorter anthology series produced by Duvall: Tall Tales & Legends (9 episodes), which followed the same format as Faerie Tale Theatre and focused on classic American folk tales, and Nightmare Classics (4 episodes produced out of the planned 6).